The newly appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy Schools in London, Fiona Rae is the first woman to hold the post in the institution’s two-century history. She is an avid experimenter, freely combining colors, textures, and genres; her vibrant, semiabstract canvases unseat the still-ubiquitous distinction between fine art and entertainment. “I tend to respond to what’s going on in the culture at large,” she tells me when I visit her spacious ground-floor studio in a former East End cigarette factory.

Rae, whose work was recently on view at London’s Timothy Taylor Gallery, first came to public attention in the late 1980s. She was part of a group of Goldsmiths students — Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Michael Landy were others — who turned the U.K. art world on its head. But while most of her contemporaries favored an overtly conceptual approach, Rae chose to focus exclusively on art’s most traditional medium. Still, her practice is anything but nostalgic — it is intensely of the moment, a take on the daily saturation of visual stimuli and a response to incessant fluxes of information and the global mishmash of cultural references. “Everything is possible material for a painting,” she says. “My approach is quite iconoclastic, and I want to extend what’s possible by including things that some people think are not quite appropriate.” 

To take a look at the inside of Fiona Rae’s studio, click on the slideshow. 

This article was published in the January 2013 issue of Modern Painters.